‘My children, my children’: Gaza family killed minutes before ceasefire | News about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine – The truce in Gaza it was due to start at 8.30am (06.30 GMT). The al-Qidra family endured 15 months of Israeli attacks. They were displaced several times and lived in a tent. Their relatives were among the more than 46,900 Palestinians killed by Israel.

But al-Qidras survived. And they wanted to go home.

Ahmed al-Qidra packed his seven children onto a donkey cart and headed to eastern Khan Younis. It was finally safe to travel – the bombing had to stop.

But the family did not know that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had been postponed. Little did they know that, even in those extra few hours, Israeli planes were still flying over Gaza, ready to drop their bombs.

The explosion was loud. Ahmed’s wife Hanan heard it. She stayed with relatives downtown, organizing their belongings, planning to join her husband and children a few hours later.

“I felt like an explosion hit me in the heart,” Hanan said. She instinctively knew that something had happened to her children, whom she had just said goodbye to.

“My children, my children!” she screamed.

The cart was hit. Hanana’s eldest son, 16-year-old Adly, was dead. As well as her youngest, six-year-old Sama, the child in the family.

Yasmin, 12, explained that the four-wheel-drive vehicle was in front of a trolley carrying people celebrating the ceasefire. Maybe that was the reason the missile hit.

“I saw Sama and Adly lying on the ground, and my father bloody and unconscious on the gurney,” said Yasmin. She pulled her eight-year-old sister Aseel out before the second missile hit where they were. Eleven-year-old Mohammed also survived.

Ali Ahmed, Hanana’s life partner, was pronounced dead at the hospital.

‘My children were my world’

Sitting on the edge of her injured daughter Iman’s hospital bed at Nasser Khan Younis Hospital, Hanan was still in shock.

“Where was the ceasefire?” she asked. In their excitement to finally return to what was left of their home, the family missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that the Palestinian group Hamas had not sent the names of three Israeli prisoners who will be freed on Sunday as part of a ceasefire deal.

They did not see that Hamas explained that there were technical reasons for the delay and that the names would be provided, as they were in the end.

Little would they know that in the three-hour delay before the ceasefire finally began, three members of their family would be killed. They were among the 19 Palestinians killed by Israel in those last few hours, according to the Gaza Civil Defense.

Hanan burst into tears. Now she would have to face life without her husband and two of her children. The loss of Sama, “the last of the group”, as she described her with an Arabic saying, was especially hard.

“Sama was my youngest and most spoiled. She would get angry whenever I talked about another child.”

Adly was her “pillar of support”. Her children were her world.

“We endured this entire war, facing the most difficult conditions of displacement and bombing,” Hanan said. “My children were coping with hunger, lack of food and basic necessities.”

“We survived more than a year of this war, only for them to die in its last minutes. How can this happen?”

A day of joy turned into a nightmare. The family had celebrated the end of the war the night before.

“Hasn’t the Israeli army had enough of our blood and the crimes they committed for 15 months?” Hanan asked.

Then she thought about her future. With her husband and two children torn from her, tears streaming down her face, she asked, “What’s left?”